This article examines our intellectual and personal associations with Bill Sanders over a period of 45 years. Beginning with Thomas Charlton's dissertation research within the context of the Teotihuacan Valley Project in 1963-64, we discuss the questions left unanswered about the rural Teotihuacan occupation after the completion of the project and the publication of the results by Bill Sanders and his associates during the 1990s. We document these questions and the field work undertaken after 1964 to resolve them. In our narrative we place our intellectual interactions with Bill Sanders within a personal context to pay homage to our mentor in archaeology. In the article we place our research results from several seasons of field work in the eastern Teotihuacan Valley. Our goals during the two recent field seasons were to determine the extent of destruction by agricultural activities within several sites and at the same time, if possible, the types of domestic housing in use during the Teotihuacan period as well as the quality of the construction. Bill Sanders thought that there was some evidence from his surveys and excavations that the "apartment compound" might not be universally present and that there was some evidence that rural Teotihuacan housing might have included smaller single family residences similar to those known to have been used by the Aztecs in the same area. If such housing were present this would have implications about the organization of the size and composition of the socioeconomic group present and conceivably the degree of control exerted by Teotihuacan.